About the creator

Tiffany Westphal has 3 different roles which have informed her development of the Student Stress Investigation.

1. As a parent, she has lived experience supporting a child through 9 years of on and off school can’t across the spectrum of mild to severe.

2. Tiffany has been immersed in School Can’t Australia (SCA) since 2018.  Joining as a parent initially, she became part of the co-ordination team in 2019, and later became a founding board member of SCA.

3. Finally, Tiffany works at Rookery Road in Melbourne’s inner west as a social worker supporting families whose children are experiencing school attendance difficulties.

These three perspectives have shaped Tiffany’s development of the Student Stress Investigation cards.   

SCA directed Tiffany towards the work of Drs Stephen Porges, Ross Greene, Mona Delahooke, and Stuart Shanker, and helped her realise how important it was to identify stressors and seek to moderate her daughter’s stress load at school.  SCA’s lived experience is that the historical conceptualisation of school refusal as either a: behavioural problem, a parenting problem or a psychopathology of the individual student is resulting in interventions for school attendance difficulties that are often ineffective and frequently make things worse.  When we conceptualise school attendance difficulties as a natural involuntary response to (often chronic) stressors, and seek to identify those stressors and reduce them then we create the conditions within which students thrive.

Through SCA Tiffany speaks at conferences and provides Professional Development (PD) to parents and teachers about SCA’s lived experience knowledge in relation to school attendance difficulties.  On behalf of SCA, Tiffany co-authored a 130+ page submission to the Senate Inquiry into School Refusal and played a significant role in the design of research which informed this submission.  Tiffany writes regularly for SCA about the group’s lived experience so that other parents can benefit from the knowledge that the group has developed since it was established in 2014.

Tiffany lives in Melbourne (Australia), a short walk from Port Phillip Bay with her husband, her 3 children and their dog.  In her down time, she enjoys sunset walks along the bay with her husband and dog, playing piano and engaging in the textile arts.